The Problem with Easy Relationships is…

We often hear, “If you have to work hard at a relationship, then it’s not the right relationship for you.” This may be true if you and your partner were brought up with role model parents in openly secure and balanced loving environments, where conflicts were resolved using emotional intelligence without blame or escapism and personal responsibility for your own feelings was understood. But if this isn’t you, then you’re likely to have challenging relationships, which still may not be a bad thing and here’s why…

Most of us, including those we choose to have relationships with, have probably grown up in less than optimal parental and emotional conditions, experiencing or witnessing varying degrees of abandonment, addiction, rejection, conflict, joylessness and abuse, along with a lack of social, emotional and personal support at one time or another.

If this even partially describes you or your partner, then you’ll enter most of your relationships carrying some form of baggage. That baggage might be you treating yourself the way your parents treated themselves or you abandon yourself as they abandoned you or themselves. It could be a fear of intimacy, stemming from fears of rejection or of engulfment stemming from your parents being rejecting or overly controlling with you. You might get immediately triggered into aggression, withdrawal, compliance or resistance when conflict arises, creating unresolvable situations. But it’s not all bad..

But if you have the expectation that your relationships should be easy from the start, then you’ll likely move on when the going gets tough, only to discover that the next relationship and the one after that, and so on, are also hard.

If you’re lucky enough to have an easy relationship that has maintained passion, life, emotional connection, joyfulness, fun and play, you are very fortunate. Some of us have easy relationships because we settle for less emotional connections, thereby avoiding conflict or facing our issues, which is fine — if both parties want that.

But if you want a true ‘power relationship’ that has deep mental, emotional, spiritual and physical connections, a relationship where you rarely feel lonely, a relationship that’s ever evolving and growing toward deeper intimacy, then you and your partner have to be willing to work at it by ensuring you are both continuously healing and working on your inner selves.